Almost two years into this pandemic, there are few who have not experienced a holistic change in their personal and professional lives. The pandemic has had an indelible impact on the nature of professional work for almost everyone. Most employees have been encouraged to work from home during the COVID period. While working from home has been a fairly straightforward transition for many employees, it has nonetheless presented challenges for managers in keeping the performance of their employees up to the mark.
What is needed is for organizations to reshape the skills of their managers. This can be accomplished by training managers to shift their mindset away from traditional managing to a new management style in order to be successful. The five skills managers require to get the desired results that can assist them in this uncertain business environment are:
- Resilience
- Critical thinking
- Remote communication
- Emotional intelligence
- Innovation & creativity
We’ll explore each in further detail below.
Resilience
Most businesses worldwide are operating online; it is highly likely that this will continue even after the pandemic. It has become very important for managers to be resilient. Resilience and flexibility are about having a broad mindset when directing employees who work remotely and readjusting the working framework during the pandemic.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is one of the top managerial skills required in this Covid era. In the pandemic, the use of social media has become very common. As a result, there is a lot of divergent and often contradicting data on the internet. It is certainly the need of the hour that managers should develop strong critical thinking skills to evaluate the available information in order to make the correct decisions.
Communication with the Team Working in a Remote Environment
Communication is a challenge when your team is working remotely. A good manager should establish good communication channels to get the employees’ best performance especially when they are working remotely. This includes active listening, and the right level of virtual meetings, emails, and phone calls to assist employees to understand the task better.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a very vital element of managerial skills nowadays. It means being aware of the emotional well-being of your team members. A manager needs to check the mental health of their employees, especially during times like these when everyone is already so tense due to the pandemic. Moreover, the manager should encourage employees when they are performing their best, keep their spirits high, and give them a break when needed.
Innovation and Creativity
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that innovation and creativity are much-needed managerial skills, for the following reasons:
- To make employees more productive, a manager needs to be creative and innovative when assigning tasks to employees. Creativity and the ability to understand each team members individual motivational “value drivers” is necessary so that employees do not lose interest in the task.
- To make businesses successful in the challenging environment of the pandemic, over-performance is only possible when a culture of continuous innovation and creativity has been built.
In Summary
Given that the pandemic has reshaped the world, managers can successfully steer their teams out of the current stressful environment by using new managerial skills in a fresh and super-efficient way. After all, change and innovation are the need of the hour in every aspect of life in this pandemic!